Peng Liu

Peng Liu, Cong Xu, Jiawei Zhu et al.

As a key stage of Recommender Systems (RSs), Multi-Task Fusion (MTF) is responsible for merging multiple scores output by Multi-Task Learning (MTL) into a single score, finally determining the recommendation results. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to MTF to maximize long-term user satisfaction within a recommendation session. However, due to limitations in modeling paradigm, all existing RL algorithms for MTF can only utilize user features and statistical features as the state to generate actions at the user level, but unable to leverage item features and other valuable features, which leads to suboptimal performance. Overcoming this problem requires a breakthrough in the existing modeling paradigm, yet, to date, no prior work has addressed it. To tackle this challenge, we propose EnhancedRL, an innovative RL algorithm. Unlike existing RL-MTF methods, EnhancedRL takes the enhanced state as input, incorporating not only user features but also item features and other valuable information. Furthermore, it introduces a tailored actor-critic framework - including redesigned actor and critics and a novel learning procedure - to optimize long-term rewards at the user-item pair level within a recommendation session. Extensive offline and online experiments are conducted in an industrial RS and the results demonstrate that EnhancedRL outperforms other methods remarkably, achieving a +3.84% increase in user valid consumption and a +0.58% increase in user duration time. To the best of our knowledge, EnhancedRL is the first work to address this challenge, and it has been fully deployed in a large-scale RS since September 14, 2023, yielding significant improvements.

Javier de la Rosa, Vladislav Mikhailov, Lemei Zhang et al.

The use of copyrighted materials in training language models raises critical legal and ethical questions. This paper presents a framework for and the results of empirically assessing the impact of publisher-controlled copyrighted corpora on the performance of generative large language models (LLMs) for Norwegian. When evaluated on a diverse set of tasks, we found that adding both books and newspapers to the data mixture of LLMs tend to improve their performance, while the addition of fiction works seems to be detrimental. Our experiments could inform the creation of a compensation scheme for authors whose works contribute to AI development.

Peng Liu, Cong Xu, Ming Zhao et al.

As the last pivotal stage of Recommender System (RS), Multi-Task Fusion (MTF) is responsible for combining multiple scores outputted by Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model into a final score to maximize user satisfaction. Recently, to optimize long-term user satisfaction, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is used for MTF in RSs. However, the existing offline RL algorithms used for MTF have the following severe problems: a) To avoid Out-of-Distribution (OOD), their constraints are overly strict, which seriously damage performance; b) They are unaware of the exploration policy used to collect training data, only suboptimal policy can be learned; c) Their exploration policies are inefficient and hurt user experience. To solve the above problems, we propose an innovative method called UnifiedRL tailored for MTF in large-scale RSs. UnifiedRL seamlessly integrates offline RL model with its custom exploration policy to relax overly strict constraints, which is different from existing RL-MTF methods and significantly improves performance. In addition, compared to existing exploration policies, UnifiedRL's custom exploration policy is highly efficient, enabling frequent online exploration and offline training iterations, which further improves performance. Extensive offline and online experiments are conducted in a large-scale RS. The results demonstrate that UnifiedRL outperforms other existing MTF methods remarkably, achieving a +4.64% increase in user valid consumption and a +1.74% increase in user duration time. To the best of our knowledge, UnifiedRL is the first RL algorithm tailored for MTF in RSs and has been successfully deployed in multiple large-scale RSs since June 2023, yielding significant benefits.

Peng Liu, Nian Wang, Cong Xu et al.

Recommender System (RS) provides personalized recommendation service based on user interest. However, lots of users' interests are sparse due to lacking consumption behaviors, making it challenging to provide accurate recommendations for them, which is widespread in large-scale RSs. In particular, efficiently solving this problem in the ranking stage of RS is an even greater challenge, which requires an end-to-end and real-time approach. To solve this problem, we propose an innovative method called Dynamic User Interest Augmentation (DUIA). DUIA enhances user interest including user profile and user history behavior sequences by generating enhancement vectors and personalized enhancement vectors through dynamic stream clustering of similar users and relevant items from multiple perspectives. To realize stream clustering, we specially design an algorithm called Gradient-based Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm (GHCA) for DUIA, which performs clustering via gradient descent and stores the cluster centers in memory networks. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate that DUIA not only significantly improves model performance for users with sparse interests but also delivers notable gains for other users. As an end-to-end method, DUIA can be easily integrated with existing models. Furthermore, DUIA is also used for long-tail items and cold-start problem, which also yields excellent improvements. Since 2022, DUIA has been successfully deployed in multiple industrial RSs in Tencent and was made public in May 2024. Moreover, the thoughts behind DUIA, dynamic stream clustering and similarity-based enhancement, have inspired relevant works and have also been applied in other stages of RS.